I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

Confirmed: Google Glass Will Tether With Android And iPhone For 3G Or 4G Data

Google opened up a sort of pre-order contest for civilians (i.e., non-developers) this week for its new augmented reality headgear that should ship before the end of 2013 for $1,500 (for those with a clever enough idea.) The other significant news is that both CNET and The Verge report that “Glass will be able to connect via Bluetooth to both Android phones and the iPhone. Glass can pull down data from wifi or use the 3G or 4G feed from a connected phone, but it won’t have its own cellular radio.”

It’s nice to see that Google is not escalating the platform wars by locking iOS out of the Glass ecosystem. In truth, that would not have been in Google’s best interest. The whole point of Google’s strategy is to increase the flow of information as many ways as possible. Also, as with the rumored iWatch, squeezing a cellular radio (and another data plan) into the device doesn’t make much sense, especially since the entire target audience already has a smart phone.

The bigger question with Glass, for me, is how users will manage—and to what extent they will be allowed to manage—the huge potential torrent of data that this device will collect. The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky had a hands-on (or face-on!) with Glass at Google’s NYC HQ (and a local Starbucks) and found it very easy to acclimate to. “The privacy issue is going to be a big hurdle for Google with Glass,” he writes. “Almost as big as the hurdle it has to jump over to convince normal people to wear something as alien and unfashionable as Glass seems right now.”

I don’t think fashionability is going to be an issue, boundaries will be. Glass, product director Steve Lee tells Topolsky, ”It’s a very intimate device. We’d like to better understand how other people are going to use it. We think they’ll have a great opportunity to influence and shape the opportunity of Glass by not only giving us feedback on the product, but by helping us develop social norms as well.”

Topolsky asks about “Glass etiquette,” and wonders how “to answer questions about what’s right and wrong to do with a camera that doesn’t need to be held up to take a photo, and often won’t even be noticed by its owner’s subjects. Will people get comfortable with that? Are they supposed to?”

He hits on what is the most radical thing about Glass, the ability to record what is right in front of you, unobtrusively, in real time. Glass will so completely remove the friction from this process that we are all bound to record—and be recorded—without even thinking about it. This is great from a data flow perspective, and remarkable in terms of social science and, of course, marketing. But it places us smack in the middle of the user experience paradox of Glass.

Lee and lead industrial designer for Glass, Isabelle Olsson, told Topolsky about the questions that led them through the product development process. “What if we brought technology closer to your senses?” Lee asks “Would that allow you to more quickly get information and connect with other people but do so in a way—with a design—that gets out of your way when you’re not interacting with technology?” So this is supposed to make us more present than the hunched over masses staring at their smart phones. ”I don’t want to do that, you know? I don’t want to be that person,” says Olsson.

But if the technology is so close to our sense so as to become prosthetic—a great outcome in terms of design—how do we maintain appropriate boundaries? This is the great experiment of Glass and really for the entire “connected world.” In this way, Google is much farther ahead than Apple with its supposed iWatch. Glass’s technology is even closer to us physically, even closer (it seems) in coming to market and more active. The iWatch, like most Apple mobile products, will be more about consuming than creating content. Glass, in contrast, will be a documentary studio in an eyeglass case!

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No, it’s not just about the “huge torrent of data”. It’s about the awful filtration and funneling of “knowledge” that we already have, which is now rooted in the anonymous and unaccountable Wikipedia, turning up first or second on nearly every Google search.

How is Wikipedia “unaccountable”? Unaccountable means mysterious or unable to be explained. There’s nothing mysterious about Wikipedia. It’s a crowd-sourced collection of information. Think of a typical encyclopedia that has a single corporation in charge of it. If you discover a mistake in it, you can contact that corporation and hope that they include your fix by the following year’s release. Wikipedia just shortens that feedback loop from yearly to real-time. It also has many more eyeballs scanning it than a more typical encyclopedia.

I wonder if people are going to become cross-eyed from always staring at the upper right-hand corner of their field of vision? $1500 seems like a lot to spend on something that one can’t even try out in advance to know if they like it. Right now, this thing is attracting people based on pure hype, but if it turns out to not be as good as advertised, then I could see a lot of people clamoring to get their $1500 back.